Marking Time
by pradaloz
Summary: Link, after the end. One-shot.


**Title:** Marking Time  
**Feedback to:** pradaloz00 yahoo . com  
**Classification:** OOT  
**Rating:** PG  
**Summary:** Link, after the end.  
**Disclaimer:** All of the characters used herein are the creations and property of Nintendo. The author is not receiving any monetary compensation for this work.

On the first day, he opened his eyes.

It took a bit of blinking, but eventually he was able to see more clearly. A face. Red hair, big beautiful eyes. Malon, crying, joy indistinguishable from grief.

"You're alive," she said.

He was rather pleasantly surprised.

***

On the second day, he sat up in bed, looked around at the room, and waited for someone to answer his questions.

_How did I get here?_

_Did we win?_

_They're all dead, aren't they?_

But the look in Malon's eyes as she huddled in her father's arms answered them all. Link considered not getting up, but decided that lying around wouldn't do any good or bring anyone back.

***

On the fifth day, he cut his hand on a scythe. It didn't heal until the fifteenth day.

***

On the twentieth day, he knew something was wrong. Time was moving too slowly. Malon, Talon, and all the others he saw moved through the world the way normal people should. Only he seemed to lag behind, too slow to heal, too slow to react, too slow to believe that the Sages were gone and he was unbearably, unbelievably alone. During the day, he watched the activity around the ranch, trying to help and ending up stumbling over the emptiness. At night, he watched Malon watch him and tried not to notice the fear in her eyes.

***

At the end of the first month, he walked out of the ranch and didn't stop until the end of the second.

***

Sometime during the second year, he was walking home through the forest and realized that he was married, and, in fact, had been married for several months now. It was spring, the sunlight was bright through the canopy of leaves above him, and he was walking home to see his wife.

The notion was so absurd, he sat down in the middle of the road and laughed until he cried.

He was still hiccoughing when he arrived at the house. His wife, a sweet, round brunette with wide green eyes, asked him if he was all right, and he got himself back under control enough to convince her that he was. He kissed her in the soft light of the kitchen, and told her not to worry about him; history had proven him indestructible. She might have believed him or she might not, but she went back to fixing dinner anyway.

It amused him that he liked her--he genuinely liked her. And though she could never discuss Xerxo's precepts or the nature of the stars or what it was like to watch someone die by your hands, she never asked questions he didn't want to answer. She was pretty and kind, and he had to admit that he was happy with her.

His subconscious seemed to be happy with her, too, for it didn't treat him to any of those dreams--not about her, at any rate. It was nice to lie beside a woman, to feel her warmth and watch her breathe, and know that he would never see himself hurt her or need her or love her until she broke beneath him. In fact, his dreams seemed to be the only thing that hadn't changed since the time before. He wondered what it meant that the only proof of his former life existed in the darkness behind his eyelids, in the memory of skin and heat and moonlight.

_ithurtsitburnssogood Iloveyoudon'thurtmedon'tstop pleaseloveme ohDinohpleaseZelda_

***

It was well into the seventh year before he began to see the ghosts.

Nabooru was the first to appear. He had been out fishing--he fished a lot, it gave him an excuse to be away from people and their annoying, asinine questions. Fish were quiet. They let a man sit by himself and not think.

The day had been bright and sunny and painfully alive, and at first he'd thought that the flash of red at the edge of his vision had been a bird. But then he heard her voice.

"Hey kid, wanna see a trick?"

He'd turned his head just in time to see her wave her hand through a rock. "Pretty neat, eh?"

Impa showed up once, to his everlasting surprise. She appeared without warning on one of the days when it was his turn to take the kids to the lake and make sure no one drowned. No one else had seen her, of course, but he got to watch her take a good look around and declare, "You've gone 'round the bend, boy."

Ruto thought the kids were the cutest things, absolutely _adorable_, and the next little girl simply _had_ to be named after her, and if she wasn't, well, even in spirit form the princess of the Zora could be dangerous. She'd show him, she certainly would! Then she'd laugh, blow him kisses, and vanish into the bright blue ocean of the sky.

Darunia was annoyed that his incorporeal form kept him from giving his little brother a brotherly hug.

Rauru kept coming, and Link kept ignoring him.

Saria was the hardest, because she always looked so sad and he always felt so guilty. Of them all, Saria and Malon had been the ones he had been certain he could protect. He had been forced to accept that the others were always in danger and that no matter how powerfully he loved them, he couldn't keep them safe forever. But Saria had been only a child--an extremely old child, but a child nonetheless--and Malon hadn't had any special powers or enemies that would put her at risk.

But when Saria came, he sat with her and smiled around the guilt and told himself that one out of two wasn't so bad.

Zelda never came. He tried not to hate her for it.

***

In the middle of the tenth year, Nabooru gave him some--as always--unsolicited advice.

"You gotta go back to Hyrule, kid. Bet you've got friends there who miss you."

He wrote Malon frequently, but he supposed he owed her more than pieces of paper.

"She'd love to see you. And wouldn't you like to see us?"

He wondered if they had graves. Surely there would be some sort of memorial to the sacrifice they'd made.

"Not too sure about that, kid, but from what I hear, I left one hell of a scorch mark."

It was an idea.

"Prove it actually happened. Prove it was your life"

A shriek and a burst of laughter startled him, made the apparition beside him blink out of existence. Little Ella was chasing the baker's son through the shallows. Link watched her jump and tackle the boy, sending them both face first into the water before surfacing and waving to him. He watched, and he realized that this, too, was his life.

***

At the beginning of the eleventh year, Link returned to Hyrule. His first destination was Lon Lon Ranch, to see the only person in the kingdom that still mattered. There were tears, kisses, and suspicious looks from her husband. Link would have laughed at it all, but laughter was beginning to fade into the past.

He stayed long enough to assure himself that Malon was happy. If Malon was happy, he thought, then he had done all he could do for Hyrule. If Malon was happy, he could be done. Then, late one afternoon, he had watched from the farmhouse as she returned from the barn with her little boy. The child had held his hand out to his mother, who smiled as she took it, and mother and son had danced together in the warm light of the dying day.

The next morning, as he mounted up to ride out, he was stopped by Malon's hand on his knee.

"I know you won't go to the castle," she said, her eyes as blue and warm as the summer sky. "I understand. Even I--" she looked away. "But you need to go to the Valley." Her hand tightened on his. "You need to see it."

Link supposed so. Perhaps Nabooru would be there to tease him some more. Perhaps they'd all be there. He gathered up his reins, ready to leave.

But Malon had one more thing to say. "Let it go," she said.

He nodded silently. It wasn't her fault that she didn't understand.

***

One day later, he found it. Link hadn't been sure where exactly the place was; he had been too busy pushing Ganondorf back towards the portal the Sages had created. He knew the battle had taken them from the entrance of the Valley to somewhere along the desert's mountain range, but he hadn't had the chance to take note of his surroundings before the blast of magic had overwhelmed him. He couldn't be ashamed--the magic had been powerful enough to re-seal the dark king as well as his entire army. It had taken everything the Sages had. It had taken the Triforce.

It was the residual glimmer of the magical force that had allowed him to find the spot. A slight tickle on the edge of his senses, it was nothing like the familiar glow he'd known his whole life when the Triforce had been in the presence of magic. When the Triforce had still been present in him. Beyond that, that slight hint, there was nothing to indicate that this was the spot. To someone who had never known his kind of power, it would seem a perfectly ordinary place. Red cliffs beneath a blue sky, hardly a fitting site for his and his friends' final battle.

It was, in fact, so ordinary and so empty, that he couldn't help but look around and wonder: what had they won?

The wind echoed through the stones with an eerie keening wail, and there was nothing but him, the sun, and the empty sky. No familiar ghosts to comfort him. No triumphant blaze of Courage to sustain him. No life, no love. No hope.

He slumped to his knees and wept, alone in this place where time itself had ended.

***

Days became months became years and the years spun into a vague blur passing by him, like a slow river upon whose bank he stood, watching the current roll by. Those in the village who were of his age joked about there being nothing left to do but wait for the end. Link wished he couldn't remember the time when he hadn't been waiting. His wife was dead, and the children had children. What little there had been for him was finally gone.

So it was that he went to sit beside the lake one moonless night, when the stars ruled the sky and the air was utterly still. And he was unsurprised when at last her hand reached out to rest atop his.

"This is very trite of you, you know."

"I know," he said. But she'd always accused him of being a romantic, so he didn't know why she expected anything better. In the silence that followed, he stared at their joined hands, hers pale and smooth, his gnarled and trembling with age. It was incomprehensible how long he'd been without her.

"So tell me," he said at last. "Are you a ghost, or just a figment of my imagination?"

"I could very easily be both." From the low warmth in her voice, he could tell she was smiling. "Which would you prefer?"

He would have preferred neither. He would have preferred flesh and bone grown old and tired by his side. He would have preferred that she had loved him as much as he had loved her, and that neither of them had loved Hyrule enough to die for it.

But she hadn't, and they had, and now there was nothing he could say except her name.

Her hand tightened on his, and at last he turned to look at her, still young and beautiful in the starlight. "The flow of time is cruel," she said softly, "Can you forgive me for it?"

He pressed his face into her hair, and time melted away.

**End.**


End file.
